Botched: Plastic Surgery As TV Entertainment

Is it really ten years since they crowned the first Swan? The real winner of that reality show wasn't any of the surgically transformed girls-next-door. It was Terry Dubrow, one of the plastic surgeons behind The Swan's makeovers. Dubrow is back on TV (with some added gloss now that his wife, Heather, is one the Real Housewives of Orange County). He's brought his scalpels to E!'s Botched!, a new variation on plastic surgery as spectator sport.

Dubrow doesn't carry the workload alone. Like Nip/Tuck, the plastic surgery drama featuring two partners, this is a buddy show. Dubrow's sidekick is his old friend Paul Nassif, a nose specialist who's got his own stardust by association. He's divorced from Adrienne Maloof, formerly of the cast of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Botched is a show about fixing surgeries that have gone wrong, but the patients with warped noses, "uniboobs," bad butt implants, and body dysmorphic disorder are just featured players. The stars are the doctors, who dare to repair surgical disasters, which, if they do say so themselves, are 12s on a scale of 10 in difficulty. "This is a hero show," says Dubrow in a video promo. If the patients don't know what a good job the doctors have done, the docs are quick to exclaim at unveilings, "You look fantastic!"

Sometimes Nassif (whose resume includes a stint on Dr. 90210) appears to be wondering how he ended up in entertainment medicine—especially when he and Dubrow, dressed in black scrubs, make a house call. They are here to consult with Justin, a young man who has undergone 132 operations to make himself into a Ken doll crossed with a Transformer. Justin has implants in his arms to simulate muscles and an augmented butt to rival Nicki Minaj's. He doesn't appear to have been "botched;" he's his own creation—or monster. Nassif and Dubrow nobly refuse to operate, as if that were a difficult decision.

On The Swan, contestants who had to compete in lingerie were the ones being humiliated. On Botched, despite many good results, Dubrow gets close to crossing a different sort of line when he replaces humongous saline implants from a breast augmentation with silicone ones comparable in size. The patient is Kimber, a transgender porn star who has little natural tissue to cover such enormous add-ons. Will she be back in a later season to have her breasts replaced with smaller ones?

Dubrow and Nassif believe *Botched *is educating the public on the importance of researching doctors' credentials. But the show's real accomplishment is having incorporated all five of the recurring themes in plastic-surgery shows, as defined by Kathy Davis, a medical sociologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands: Before and afters, happy stories, sad stories, weird requests, and celebrities (if Janice Dickinson still counts). That's entertainment.